Polar Plunge: Keep Winter Cold & Prevent Food Insecurity

This past January (1/25/14), thankfully a season ago, I jumped in the frigid Potomac River with a group of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers in annual event called the “Keep Winter Cold Polar Plunge”.  The event was a fundraiser for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN), an environmental lobbying and activism group in the Maryland, Virginia, and Washington DC area.  CCAN is a nonprofit, grassroots organization that works to promote clean energy use, inform the public about climate change, and promote legislation which would lead to climate stability, hence ‘keeping winter cold’.  This year’s plunge was exceptionally cold (22F) and the river was iced over so as we “plungers” prepared on shore, CCAN staff had to chip away a path in the ice to give us access to the icy water below.  This meant that the 150 plungers (there were 6 in my RPCV group) could only go into the water in staggered shifts rather than all at once.  The event was a huge success, it raised over $70,000 for CCAN!  And no one was hurt in the extreme cold, although it took almost 24 hours for my body to readjust.  Plus, it was a ton of fun!  There was music, thoughtful speakers, and lots of laughs.  We even played a little bit of football while we were in the water and made the news (check out our video)! 

What does this have to do with Ghana and my Peace Corps service?  A lot actually, because although climate change will impact all our lives on the globe, those who are subsistence farmers will be devastated.  Many Ghanaian communities (like my host village, Diare) can be labeled “food insecure” because of issues having to do with food availability, stability, utilization, and access (the four pillars of food security).  Scientists predict upwards of 170 million people will be at risk of hunger by 2080, practically due to how changes in the climate will impact food security.

Sub-Saharan West Africa is already a very arid place and climate change is only going to make it worse.  Coupled with rising temperatures are changing jet streams and precipitation patterns.  Farmers have already, and will continue to deal with a more and more unpredictable weather.  Diare maize farmers always were complaining about the new rain patterns.  They said the rain came much later in the year now and when it did come, it came all at once and would cause flooding.  They struggled to know how to construct their plant beds – raised to keep from flooding or shallow to store the water early on.  Ghanaian farmers knew something was right but they were at the mercy of the weather for their livelihood.  Globally, climate change is affecting the whole of the international food security in complex ways.  It affects food production directly through changes in environmental conditions, like in Diare, and indirectly by affecting growth and distribution of incomes based on agricultural production.  The overall impact will differ across regions and over time, and depends on the overall socio-economic status of a country by the time the effects of climate change are felt in full force.  I know from first-hand experience that Ghana is not ready.

I want to leave you with this.  A very sophisticated study was published in 2011 that concluded, those who contribute the least greenhouse gases will be most impacted by climate change.  The Canadian research team said that the regions of greatest vulnerability to experience the change are distant (equatorial countries) from the high latitude regions from where the changes are physically occurring (polar ice caps).  This is a moral hazard that must be face by those peoples contributing to the greenhouse gases which drive global warming and further climate change.

This is why I took the polar plunge in January; because I know Earth’s climate systems are interconnected and I’m very, very concerned what my brothers and sister in Ghana will experience if our energy and environmental policies don’t change. 

 

This map from Samson et al., 2011, shows the global climate-demography vulnerability index (CDVI).  Low vulnerability is blue and high vulnerability is in red.

References:

Schmidhuber, J., & Tubiello, F. N. (2007). Global food security under climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(50), 19703-19708.

Samson, J. J., Berteaux, D. D., McGill, B. J., & Humphries, M. M. (2011). Geographic disparities and moral hazards in the predicted impacts of climate change on human populations. Global Ecology & Biogeography, 20(4), 532-544. doi:10.1111/j.1466-8238.2010.00632.x